Finance · Emerging Markets
The best-known companies aren’t the only place growth lives. A calm look at emerging markets, the real promise, the real potholes, and how I think about them.
A city that was building itself
I remember standing in a city I had never visited before, watching cranes swing against the skyline in every direction, feeling the particular hum of a place being built faster than anyone can quite keep up with. It is a feeling rarely found in the older, richer corners of the world, where the growing was mostly done long ago. That hum is the thing investors mean, in their drier language, when they talk about emerging markets.
What the phrase actually means
Emerging markets are a slightly grand label for economies still assembling the machinery that wealthier countries take for granted. Growing populations, expanding cities, people moving from just getting by to spending. When a country makes that shift, the businesses that serve it can grow to a maturity that mature economies cannot. The maths of catching up is powerful, because it is easier to double from a small base than to squeeze more out of an economy that already has everything, and for a patient investor, that can be a genuine opportunity rather than a gamble.
The potholes are real, and I will not hide them
I would be no friend to you if I only showed you the cranes. These markets can test your nerve in ways the familiar ones rarely do. Currencies swing, the rules can change with little warning, and a promising story can stall on a problem, even if it has nothing to do with the business itself. There is also the simple matter of information. In familiar markets, you are drowning in analysis. Further afield, the picture can be thinner and harder to trust, a little more homework and a great deal more humility about what you don’t know. This is not a corner of the world for money you might need next month, for anyone who checks a price and panics.
One basket or one country
When I do hold this, I lean towards a broad spread rather than a single bet on one nation’s fortunes. Backing one country is backing its politics, its currency and its weather all at once, which is a lot of eggs in a basket you don’t control. A spread across many emerging economies smooths out the worst of the individual dramas, so one country’s bad year doesn’t undo the whole idea. It is less thrilling than picking the next great success story, and rather more likely to still be standing when you check back.
Diversification, doing its quiet job
The case for any of this is not a thirst for excitement. It is that spreading money across stories that do not all rise and fall together is simply sound sense, in the portfolio as in life. Even that has its limits, as I found the hard way and wrote about in When Everything Falls Together, when supposedly separate things decide to move as one. So I think of emerging markets as a single slice of a wider plate, sized so that a bad year is a disappointment rather than a disaster. For a sober sense of the wider growth picture, the International Monetary Fund publishes outlook work worth a slow read.
The point underneath
A quiet conviction in all this is that if people prosper, economies prosper, and much of the world’s prospering is happening in places that rarely reach the front pages here. You do not have to bet the house on it. You only have to stop assuming that the only growth worth owning speaks with an accent you already recognise.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, and confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for information and education only. It is not financial, investment or professional advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. The Jacqueline Brand is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and past performance is not a guide to future returns. Figures were correct at the time of publication. Always do your own research and consider speaking to a regulated adviser. Where cryptoassets are discussed, they are high risk and largely unregulated in the UK, and you could lose all the money you invest. The Collection
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